Monday, February 06, 2012

Trek Toys (re-post)

Back during one of the past Christmas seasons I ran a series of posts describing several of the toys that I received as a child at Christmas time. Seeing as how I am posting a series of Star Trek posts, I thought I would re-post the entry about the Star Trek toys of the 70s. Here it is:

Before Star Wars, there was of course, Star Trek. Don't get me wrong, Star Wars still rocks and the toys that they put out for Star Wars were and still are awesome. But the toys for Star Trek were a little more, I don't know, adult feeling. Take for instance the Star Trek Communicators.These babies were real. Heavy plastic with real working walkie talkie parts! They came in a package of two and you could use these anywhere! What was really cool was when you hit the little red button on the side it made a high pitched squeal that if hit at the same time as the talk button, could be broadcast to the other communicator! How cool is that?!?!? I still have one of these communicators and it still works! I also had the super cool phaser gun that shot discs! This rocked as well. You loaded up the phaser with the discs (mine were multi-colored, not like the ones in the picture) and just pulled the trigger. Toys like this would never be approved today but back then, they were the best!!!! I'm sure my poor sister took many a plastic disc to the body and face from this plastic weapon.

The action figures for Star Trek were more like the old super hero action figures. They were tall and wore real uniforms complete with utility belts, tricorders and small phasers. Again, these small pieces would never pass inspection today. I had Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty and a Klingon. These came with the Enterprise Playset!This was an amazing toy! On the outside was a drawing of space with the Enterprise soaring through it. The inside was the bridge of the Enterprise, complete with Captain's Chair, Command Center and a screen that could be changed with various scenes of planets and aliens and such. The coolest feature was, without a doubt, the transporter. You would put an action figure in the transporter and spin the dial on the top. There were two buttons to stop the spinning. The red one put the action figure facing the outside while the green one put them facing the inside. Super cool!!!!!! This toy was designed really well because when you were done playing with it, you just folded it up with everything inside and stored it on the shelf (or on top of the toy chest in our house!)The last Star Trek item I want to show you is the Telescreen Console. This was pretty cool. You could sit Captain Kirk (or any other character for that matter) in the Captain's Chair and then play a pseudo-video game where you would have to hit various asteroids and planets and such. It was pretty cool and from what I can tell, very rare. I haven't seen too many of these around, even on e-bay. They're hard to come by! Anyway, it provided me with lots of good times! A special thanks to Plastic Stallions and The Mego Museum for the pictures.

2 comments:

Wendel
said...

While you have an impressive collection, you are missing one, important, Star Trek toy. That is the "Star Trek Tracer Gun and Tracer Rifle."

These guns shot small plastic disks and were fashioned to look like "ray" pistols though nothing like the phasers of the series. The "rifle" was just the pistol with an extended stock. Even at that, they were fun guns that shot a disk a considerable distance.

Apparently we had very similar childhoods as I too received many of the same toys as you probably that same Christmas! (Including the Telescreen Console which I STILL have in a banged up box. I remember that the lightbulb burn out on it many years ago. I should get it out to see if I can get it working again.)

Anyway, not to diminish your memories or anything but the Star Trek Phaser pictured in the did not shoot discs. You placed one of the disks in the front "barrel" of the phaser and pulled the trigger. It would make the phaser sound and project the image on the disc on the wall. If I recall there were Trek phasers that shot discs but not the one pictued in the ad. (I still have my phaser as pictured in the add complete with discs but missing the batter cover, unfortunately.)

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